Hoy, OP, I’ve visited your neck of the woods. One Saturday on a 2-week business trip to Msrtland Heights, I rode my motorcycle through Bixby, Viburnum, and Dillard. You live in a beautiful part of the country.
Add a multi-vitamin. To ensure you get your ADAs.
Steamed carrots with butter are good, cheap, and nutritious. Veggie soup with barley and the cheapest cut of meat you can find.
If there is a Costco near you, consider a membership. This costs $60/year, but they have excellent prices on items in bulk. For example, big packs of chicken; freeze most, use a bit at a time. Get a 36-pack of eggs and a tub of spinach; voila, spinach omelets for breakfast (or lunch or dinner). Fry it in organic olive oil sold at bargain prices. Season with garlic salt (yes, yes, I know Americans get too much sodium). 36-packs of apples will add variety and fiber.
Your issue will be managing your purchases so that they don’t go bad, so you’ll want to look at things that will last. Many fruits like apples and pears will last a long time if refrigerated. Eggs last forever even at room temperature. Chicken can be frozen and defrosted as desired. A big Costco tub of greens, on the other hand, may start to go before you finish it; however you can get creative with it. Spinach omelets, spinach sauteed with garlic (or just garlic salt), spinach in breakfast smoothies with ice and frozen berries (also available in large bags from Costco). You can also get loads of bread at a time, some of which you can freeze–or just refrigerate, I find it takes a long time for refrigerated loaves to go actually bad as opposed to somewhat stale. Big tubs of peanut butter which never goes bad and you can even add to stir fries for a different taste. Bananas you probably don’t want, you can’t eat them fast enough unless there are at least four banana eaters in your family (but I think you’re single?)
I should add that I find the quality of food at Costco is generally excellent.
You can also save on necessaries like toilet paper by buying it in bulk at Costco. Not to mention printer ink and paper if you need to print any of your work.
AND, disclaimer, I am NOT an employee of Costco, no relationship at all. I just like it.
Been there, done that. My basic diet was cereal and milk for breakfast, fruit for lunch, rice, beans and vegetables for dinner. My one indulgence was a $1.06 7-11 coffee refill. I was on EBT and getting help from the food bank.
For the most part, you get only a fraction of the nutrition from raw veggies as from cooked. And I agree that making soup from the cooking water is good. Bread is easy to make. I add corn, oats, 7 grain cereal, and ground flax seed to the dough, which ought to provide a lot of trace nutrients.
English isn’t my first language; Do you mean that cooking vegetables increases the nutrition you get from them? If so, how come? They take more time to digest than the human digestive system has and cooking acts as pre-digestion?
Was your cereal subsidized? Unless you’re talking about plain oatmeal. Cold cereal is one of the most cost-inefficient ways of getting nutrition. They really jack the price in relation to any nutritional value it provides (especially the kind that’s mostly sugar). That said, when I had babies and we got WIC, we had all the free cornflakes with milk we could eat. I really grew to like cornflakes that year, but I haven’t bought any cereal other than plain rolled oats for many years. I use it to make my own granola and save a ton of $$ that way.
Ramen
Canned Vegetables
Rice
Canned Beans (save on prep time, time is money too)
tomato sauce
frozen chicken legs and thighs
cheap bread loafs (french bread or sliced)
potatoes
onions
celery (nice addition to ramen)
canned corned beef
eggs
milk
tabasco sauce/low sodium soy sauce etc…
Shop at Aldi if possible.
You can make many many meals on this and it will be dirt cheap. I also second the notion of a crockpot.
Precooking softens the cell walls in vegetables so you absorb some of the nutrients more readily. Figuratively, you could call it pre-digestion.
A lot of the lists and suggestions are good. I’ll add that canned mackerel is usually much cheaper than canned tuna, and can be used in similar ways.
Also eat whole wheat bread instead of white. Even for toast, or pb sandwiches. (I actually find I like it better, because it has more flavor than white bread. Now when I go to a restaurant I usually order my sandwiches on wheat rather than white.)
Avoid ramen. It’s cheap, but horrible for you. Once in a while is okay, but it’s full of salt and fat. It’s definitely NOT nutricious, by any means.
Another thing is if you have a food processor and your craving some ice cream, toss some chopped up frozen bananas in that baby and you have some instant softserve! (You can do it with a blender too, but it’s tough on the motor. In that case, blend the fruit first, then freeze)
Soup. Cook everything in the water you are also going to eat.
Somebody upthread mentioned home made bread, I second this, it’s fun, it’s educational if you’ve never done it before, it’s both science and art and best of all, it is the yummiest food of all that you will ever taste in your entire life (you simply cannot beat bread steaming hot freshly baked from the oven even with no butter on it) Second best of all, any time you boil pasta (or anything almost really), save that water to make bread. Got some old potatoes about to start sprouting? boil them, mash them mix them into the bread dough, got some tomatoes starting to look shriveled and old? cook them up and make tomato bread…America’s Test Kitchen has the best bread recipe I’ve found. They’ve modernized it to account for things like fast acting yeast and whatnot.
anyway, also if you have Frugal Gourmet cookbooks, just remember the frugal part meant Ol’ Jeff didn’t waste any of the not-inexpensive ingredients he insisted you use in his cookbooks.
The food bank package always had a box of generic cornflakes, raisin bran and oatmeal.
Let’s suppose the goal isn’t “eat as well as possible on 4 bucks a day” but “eat as cheap as possible, period”.
What is cheapest? Eggs and Ramen? Rice and beans? And what’s the cheapest combo that is actually nutritionally complete enough that you can survive on it indefinitely?
I suppose a true power-shopper would just go by deals. They’d have some way to work out the nutritional worth of any given food item (maybe how many calories or how many grams of protein it has) and then buy whatever is on sale that works out to be the most bang/buck.
Though eggs, ramen, and I guess some kind of green vegetable seems like a fairly close to the bottom way to go. I’ve seen a dozen eggs on coupon for under a buck, ramen can be under 5 cents a pack, and maybe you can scavenge expired vegetables from the dumpster or something.
I remember some forum debate (possibly from here) about what single dish is designed too keep you up indefinitely without any nutrition deficiencies. Consensus was, if I recall correctly, mashed potatoes (boiled taters, spoon of milk (for D vitamin) and a slice of butter (body needs some fats too)). Also. Cheap. 2 pounds a day should do the trick.
Mashed potatoes will leave you deficient in a lot of essential amino acids, unless you eat way too much of them.
The absolute cheapest is almost certainly going to be some combination of grain and legume, plus some cheap vegetable for vitamins, and a little fat. In the US specifically, my guess would be peanut butter, bread, and cabbage.
Aren’t eggs more complete-ish, being an animal protein that is an entire animal all at once? Also eggs and ramen sounds marginally more appetizing. Peanut butter seems awfully expensive to fit the criteria, and I’m not sure the cheap peanut butter is that high a percentage of legitimate peanuts…
Well, let’s see… I’m finding Jif peanut butter at $1 for a 16-oz jar. Generic brands would surely be cheaper, but that’s harder to search for. It looks like peanut butter runs about 25% protein, so that’d be 4 oz protein, or 110 grams of protein for a dollar.
Eggs, meanwhile, I can’t find a price online, but let’s say $2 for a dozen large. Each egg has about 6 grams of protein, or about 36 grams per dollar.
Both are pretty cheap, but it looks like the peanut butter is the clear winner, here, especially since you’ll also be getting some protein from the also-cheap bread.
Discount grocery stores can be a big help. WinCo Foods (a western chain of employee owned warehouse style supermarket) can help in keep food costs down.
But before I go to WinCo, I check out Grocery Outlet (we affectionately call “Gross Out”), another discount supermarket that offers overstocked and closeout items in addition to their usual discounted fare. But since I can’t count on their stocking the same items week to week, I visit them first.
Bulk foods are a huge budget saver. WinCo has a bulk food corner where I can buy all kinds of rice, pasta, beans (including lentils), cereal, oatmeal, etc. for a fraction of what their packaged versions cost.
Chicken and pork are the inexpensive meats but as already noted, not necessary for a healthy diet. Rice and beans together from complete proteins and they’re like $0.50 per pound in bulk. Vegetables and fruits: whatever seems reasonable. I like celery and it’s always incredibly cheap. I cut it up and add it to stir fries and rice dishes for the texture plus peanut butter on a celery stick is a comfort food from when I was a child.
Then I throw stuff at my rice cooker ala Roger Ebert and voilà, it’s always good.